Free Educational Toolkits to Learn More about Honey Bees

Keep feeding those honey bees! Bees need our ongoing help to thrive, so Bees Matter has created a wealth of resources for teachers and parents, including downloadable lesson plan toolkits. This post is in partnership with Bees Matter, an initiative to spread news about honey bee health in Canada.

For the past several weeks, we have been helping honey bees through a series of posts in partnership with Bees Matter — an initiative to spread awareness and information about honey bee health in Canada.

For our second post, we focused on how to plant pollinator friendly gardens so honey bees have sufficient local food sources. In order to get Canadians planting pollinator-friendly gardens across the country, Bees Matter designated June 5th to 12th as National Planting Week across the country and offered free Buzzing Gardens seed kits so everyone could get involved and plant their own pollinator-friendly garden.

Pollen and nectar are two of the most important things in a honey bee’s life. They use it to feed their hives, and they need them to fuel their incredible journeys to find flowers as sources of food. The closer their hives are built to food sources, the easier those trips become and the better prepared for winter the hive will be.

Since a lack of nutrition is one of the major contributors to honey bee health issues, we can do our part to make sure that honey bees near where we live are treated to sustainable and nutritious sources of pollen and nectar.

Now that National Planting Week is over, it doesn’t mean our work is done. We can still help honey bees and other pollinators!

To help get you and your kids excited and equipped for your ongoing mission to help provide proper nutrition to honey bees, Bees Matter has provided a ton of free resources, such as videos, downloadable PDFs, toolkits and more, at the BeesMatter.ca learning centre.

For parents, educators and everyone who care about pollinators such as honey bees, you definitely want to check out beesmatter.ca and take advantage of all their free tools, especially their free toolkits.

These fantastic teacher-focused toolkits are tailored to each province’s curriculum and contain instructions to teachers, lesson plans, worksheets, and more. There are lesson plans specifically about honey bees, as well as lesson plans about plants and flowers.

Before I learned about the Bees Matter initiative, I felt confused and overwhelmed about the health and preservation of honey bees in Canada and around the world. Now, I feel informed and equipped to do my part to help feed our local honey bees. Education and information changes everything — and every very little pollinator friendly garden can help!

So don’t think that you and your family can’t do anything to help the honey bee population thrive. You CAN play an important role — and honey bees and other pollinators will thank you by continuing to pollinate all the food and flowers we need and love!